


How to Disappear Completely

by narceus



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: F/M, Paris - Freeform, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-16
Updated: 2011-07-16
Packaged: 2017-10-21 11:04:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narceus/pseuds/narceus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's nothing like love and a little bit like desperation, the way Ariadne's eyes light up when he brings out the silver case, the way Arthur's never been good at 'alone'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How to Disappear Completely

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Radiohead song of the same name. Thanks to tygrestick ([http://tygrestick.livejournal.com/](on%20LJ)) for the beta!

It's bright outside the restaurant. Los Angeles is always sunny, especially at 10:30 in the morning, local time. In Sydney it's 4:30 AM the next day. In Paris, it's half past seven, and that's as good a time zone to lay claim to as any. In LA, enough money will buy much stranger things than a celebratory three-course dinner and a bottle of wine.

"I can't believe we're getting away with this," Ariadne says, eyes shining a little too bright as she takes a sip from her glass. They're sharing a bright, fruity sparkling local white that's much too sweet for Arthur's taste to go with seared sesame tuna and ginger-glazed duck. After two months in France, it's almost unbearably Californian. This might almost, under some set of circumstances, qualify as a date.

"Champagne at ten in the morning, or what we did to get here?" he asks. It's safe enough, for the moment. They were unsuspicious at the airport and Fischer hasn't had enough time to realize he ought to be having them followed yet. The important thing is not to leave a trail to backtrack once he, or Peter Browning, finally do.

"Both!" Ariadne gestures with her fork, a little sweeping gesture that means nothing and somehow is meant to convey all of existence. "I have a red-eye through Chicago into Paris tonight." Which Arthur already knows, seeing as how he's the one who bought the tickets, but he nods. "I'll have gone around the whole world in less than three days. And I have to be registered for the next semester by Monday."

"Will you be ready?" Arthur asks. She nods.

"Yeah, I mean, I know which classes they offer that I want to take. It's just hard to process, going from...from the flight between Sydney and LA," because Ariadne is a good girl, smart enough not to say _inception_ out loud in public, even if it's a nonsense word to 95% of the waking world, "back to drafting class and buildings that always stay the same shape inside."

There's frustration, ready to simmer up underneath that glow of triumph. It hasn't bubbled over yet, but it's coming. Arthur would say something calming, if he didn't know the feeling far too well himself.

"It's always weird, after a job," is what he says instead. Ariadne won't leave dreaming for love, god, or money at this point, it's all over her face. There will be another job for her. He knows it, even if she doesn't. "You get used to it eventually."

"Yeah?" she asks, a little muffled by mouthful of tuna, but her expression's gone thoughtful. "How about you? You and Cobb were partners, right? What're you going to do, now that he's back with his children?"

Arthur takes a much deeper drink of the too-sweet sparkling wine than necessary, like it will somehow put off having to live the answer to that question. "First, back to Paris," he says when he puts his glass down. "Clean up our tracks, break down the warehouse. After that, who knows?"

"Oh, yeah?" Ariadne smiles. "Well, while you're in Paris, you know where to find me. We could go to dinner again, maybe some time after the sun's actually gone down, and you can tell me what you're like when you're not doing sixteen kinds of research or bickering with Eames."

It's not just a dinner invitation, though maybe it would've been if he hadn't indulged his curiosity in the hotel lobby. Last time Arthur mixed his business with his personal life he ended up with sole responsibility for Dom Cobb for two years, it's what left Cobb a downward-spiraling wreck in the first place, but now Cobb is back with his children and Arthur's business calendar has suddenly and abruptly cleared to nothing. Maybe it's time to take a risk.

"Secretly," Arthur says with a conspiratorial look, "I'm a devoted fan of ice hockey."

~~~

 

Ariadne is nothing at all like Mal, which can only be a striking testament to her own particular kind of self-possession, because she slid into so many of the gaps Mal left in their lives that it's a wonder everyone hasn't managed to get them both just a little confused.

She spent the whole job watching Dom, when he wasn't looking in her direction and even when he was, more intent on him than Arthur and Eames and Yusuf put together, more even than the work. And yet Arthur couldn't detect even a hint of romantic longing in her eyes. Ever since Mal's death, Dom's blazing charisma has been banked down to smoldering embers hidden just under his skin, no longer brilliant but still glowing hot enough to burn anyone who got close enough to feel it. He is still young, attractive, passionate, tragic, but Ariadne looks at him with the same gleam of intrigue as one of her architectural puzzles, with the same watchful wariness as projections that haven't yet begun to turn. Dom looked through Ariadne and out the other side, with eyes only for the memory of Mal.

They found her in Paris but she is unabashedly North American, from her wardrobe to her thorough knowledge of video games. She's moaned about how impossible it was to find peanut butter anywhere in France, and licked her fingers clean after a midafternoon snack with a guilty little grin to anyone who was watching. When the Frenchmen on the street smiled after her and called her " _jolie jeune fille_ " and " _tres ravissante!_ " she ducked her head into her scarf and blushed where Mal would have waved merrily and winked, content in her own beauty and the ring nestled on her finger.

Mal's father adores her and her favorite architecture is full of graceful, sweeping shapes, clean lines, and good taste. Ariadne is far better with the practical, though, than Mal ever was, or maybe that's only the circumstances. If Mal had ever had to design the mazes of a dream for a complicated criminal inception, maybe she'd have forgone some of her lofty cathedrals and delicate crystal monuments in favor of the sort of walls you could hide behind and shoot from.

Ariadne is pert and cheeky and the sort of young that would rather devour new knowledge than wrap itself in the pride and security of its own naiveté. Arthur wrapped her fingers around the grip of a gun and pointed her at a row of tin cans perched on a low wall in the middle of a cornfield, and then later at the swarm of projections dressed like angry farmers, complete with pitchforks, come to chase them off, and then later at his own forehead, needing to know if she could dare. She missed every time but the last. Arthur gives her points for being willing to go under again, for recognizing that she's still as much of a liability in a firefight as an asset, and for never asking where he learned to separate a man's head from his torso at a hundred and fifty feet without so much as a blink.

Arthur likes her in a way that is completely divorced from anything he ever felt for Mal, except for occasionally when it's not. Ariadne is full of grace and beauty and love for music and fine art and the joy of building the impossible, and sometimes it cannot help but remind him, if not of Mal herself, then of her magnificently generous hedonism. She reminds Arthur of the first person to ever walk him through an art museum, talking as though vibrant colors and clean lines were to be luxuriated in.

Mal loved fine things, beautiful things, not only to look at but to hear, to taste, to touch. Arthur will readily admit that any true understanding he has of the aesthetic or the indulgent over the practical comes from her. The gentle curves of the lines Ariadne draws, the glitter in her eyes when she talks about Impressionistic art, remind Arthur of the woman who told him in no uncertain terms that he owed himself the experience of making slow, indolent love for an entire night and falling asleep just as the sun broke the horizon.

Ariadne does not necessarily trigger a sense of _want_ so much as a reminder that it is, on occasion, appropriate and acceptable to give in to such wants when they occur. He respects her as well as likes her, and he can't remember the last person he could say that about besides Dom--who he does not always _like_ so much as love, inescapably, like an older brother or a dog to his master or a soldier to the one captain in the company whose leadership was worth shit. She finds him at least a little bit charming, says the brief test of a kiss on the second level; likes him, and didn't let the moment distract her from the task at hand for more than a second. 

Arthur goes to Paris because he is Cobb's man in this game even if Cobb himself is no longer in it, and the warehouse needs emptying, the tracks need covering, just like a hundred times before. Arthur is used to being the first man in on a job and the last man out, so he cleans out the workshop with meticulous care, scrubs the last of the stains from Yusuf's explosions out of the floor on his hands and knees, finds a listing agent to dispose of the property as quietly as he acquired it, two and a half months ago.

He doesn't love France as much as the idea of France, and he hasn't seen his mother in six months, but summer is creeping on towards fall and Paris is kinder in the winter than the Midwest has ever been. Ariadne's smile is warm. Her bed is warmer.

Arthur goes to Paris for Cobb even though Cobb doesn't spare the issue even enough thought to ask him to. He stays for...plenty of reasons, really.

 

~~~ 

At first, it's just a dinner:

"I promised you something at a more appropriate hour," Arthur says, and takes her arm to lead her into the restaurant. He's wearing a suit, gray silk, as well-pressed and expensively tailored as anything she's seen him in, even in a dream. She's wearing a new dress, something short and green and a little avant-garde, chic and much too expensive for an architecture student. It suits her.

"This is fantastic," she says. The ceilings are a soaring masterpiece, the restaurant dimly lit, all peach and gold and ivory, and the china probably costs as much as Arthur's mother makes in a year.

Part of dealing in dreams, Arthur has always found, is that once you begin you find that a previously mundane reality becomes dreamlike. This much elegant opulence isn't necessarily par for the course in the life of an extractor, but with millions of dollars at stake on each job, it's never too inaccessible, either. He pulls Ariadne's chair out for her like he really is the gentleman she thinks, and wonders which motive is worse: spreading this out in front of her to woo her into bed with him, or to woo her into a life of crime. He'd like to believe that he's only here because Ariadne deserves beautiful things, but he won't fool himself that he's so magnanimous.

"You should try the duck," he says.

At the end of the night he insists on seeing her back to a cab instead of letting her take the metro, tipsy and full of laughter in cheap jewelry and a seven-hundred-dollar dress. Ariadne looks him in the eye speculatively as they wait for a taxi, close enough to kiss if he leaned in to her, far enough away that any approach would seem obvious and sleazy if she didn't want him to do it.

"Next time, it's my turn to pick the place," she says. "I mean, if you're still in town and you're up for it. It's not upscale or anything, and I don't know if a dance club's really your kind of thing, but I used to go there all the time with my friends last year."

"Sounds like fun," Arthur tells her, and doesn't kiss her before he helps her slide into a cab.

She isn't trying to impress him--he is, without judgment, four years older than her and a hundred times more well-traveled, but Ariadne seems to take it in stride. She's asking him to meet her on her ground, rather than offering what she thinks he might want. Arthur respects that enough to be worth the ten minutes he spends staring at his closet, wondering what French college students wear to dance clubs.

In the end he digs out the suitcase he told himself not to bring back from California, the one full of comfortably worn jeans he doesn't mind fraying a little and button-down shirts bought off the rack at Macy's instead of a tiny, exclusive tailor in the 8éme _arrondissement_. This isn't a business relationship, here, and the sooner he admits that to himself, the safer he might get out of it.

She meets him at the metro stop at Anvers, raises her eyebrows at his attire but doesn't say anything, just nods approvingly, and leads him to a bar that's already brimming with life and noise.

"I hope you don't mind dancing with me," she shouts over her shoulder. He leans in towards her ear.

"Next time, I'll teach you to tango."

She has to turn her head to meet his eyes, wicked gleam and hands reaching for his. "Who says I don't already know?" she asks, then pulls him onto the dance floor.

It's fun. It's not any kind of fun Arthur's had in a very long time.

They stagger out into the night hours later, damp with sweat and the vodka cranberry somebody spilled down the back of Arthur's white shirt, smelling of booze and sweat and hormones and giddy happiness. Arthur doesn't wait for any protest, just crowds onto the packed night bus behind her, following her through her transfers all the way back to Cité Universitaire on the very southern side of the city. His hotel is north of the river, in the sixteenth _arrondissement_ , half the distance they just traveled from the club and another forty-five minutes to go by train, if it weren't already past two with the trains all stopped running.

He walks her up to the door of her _residence_ anyway, because well-armed gentlemen with eight to ten years of combat experience don't leave beautiful women to walk themselves home at three in the morning, and Ariadne is somehow still laboring under the impression that he's a gentleman. She lets him, or doesn't say anything about it, until they're on the sidewalk outside the building.

"Well, this is good-night," Arthur says good-naturedly, but Ariadne turns and takes both of his hands again, tilting her head up to look him straight in the eye under what little illumination the street lamps provide.

"Look, Arthur, I don't know what you think is happening here? But if you want something, I'm on board," Ariadne says. "I just need you to tell me what you're looking for. You have to ask."

Which is straightforward enough, when it comes down to it, and no more than fair. "I'd like you to invite me up to your room," Arthur says. "And I'd like to take you to lunch next week."

Ariadne's serious, considering expression holds a moment longer, before her lips curve upwards, a slow smile. "I'd like that, too," she says.

She makes him breakfast, just eggs on toast, already dressed because she has to rush out the door to get to class. They don't see each other for another five days. He takes her to lunch.

Whatever it is, it works.

~~~ 

Everything that Arthur owns fits neatly into three hard-sided suitcases and a small storage unit just outside of Pasadena. Over the years he's lost more clothing to hasty abandonment in hotel rooms as he's fled some country or another than to actual wear and tear. The tailor where he gets himself fitted for replacement waistcoats knows him by name.

Arthur has developed a strict between-extractions routine over the past two years. There are things that Arthur does not do during a job: Check the sports scores. Wear jeans. Have sex. Call his mother. Get properly drunk. His job is not his life, and there's a time and a place for those things that threaten his concentration, if not his priorities.

It doesn't stop him from taking off his tie and sloppily shoving up the sleeves of a $300 dress shirt after fourteen straight hours of data mining, or sipping his way through a bottle of wine until he threatens the limits of tipsiness. He jerks off nightly, heated and fast with his teeth sinking into his bottom lip, on those nights he makes it back to his hotel at all. There is a line, though, between necessary stress relief and outside distraction, and Arthur toes it smartly.

Arthur has a between-extractions routine that starts with taking at least three planes under at least two names before collapsing facedown in the shittiest tourist trap hotel he can find with a pool big enough to swim laps in. When his path takes him back to the States he always goes through LA, switches out his work suitcase with the Zegna and the Glock and the extra ammo for the suitcase with the twenty-dollar jeans and the UCLA t-shirts he wound up with three exes ago. Otherwise he drops fifty bucks on a couple of shirts and a pair of pants that doesn't need ironing, and donates to a local thrift store before he leaves.

It has meaning, of course it does. Clothes carry a feeling of ritual. Arthur shucks the tailored slacks and remembers rare days spent on leave, nothing but the dog tags weighing against his chest to call him back again in the morning. There is meaning in a uniform, weight and freedom both. There is meaning in folding it aside for a few weeks of civilian life.

The first night, Arthur always makes it a point to find a bar showing sports on at least three TV's, and get roaringly drunk enough that it seems like a good idea to go home with the first person to ask him. The sex is always sloppy and harsh, panting moans and no words. Arthur closes his eyes when he comes and leaves before his partner wakes up, stumbling and already feeling lighter by several layers.

He spends a couple of weeks unaccountable to anyone or anything. He loses himself as another brash young American tourist in a sea of them, going to beaches and museums and as many major sporting events as he can get tickets to. He fucks people he'll never see again, mostly women but always a couple of men, because he can't be thrown out of something he hasn't been a part of for years.

And the time between jobs didn't used to be this way, back in the days when he had an apartment in his own name and Dom and Mal had him over for dinner every Thursday night. Back then he'd have three months between jobs, sometimes, but Dom can't be trusted for long on his own and Arthur learned to condense his leave time down to the sharpest, brightest points.

None of this explains why, as the days roll by into weeks, he's still living out of the same Paris hotel room with no pool in sight. Arthur's had to find a laundromat, after two months loyally patronizing the local dry cleaner's. He's seen Saint-Chappelle more times than he cares to count. When he found himself a bar full of English-speaking travelers and British expats, he chugged Guinness until he stood on his chair to shout at the rugby game playing on the screens overhead, then went back to his hotel alone.

Ariadne doesn't comment on his hangover the next day because he doesn't see her until the following weekend, but Arthur still doesn't bother trying to get laid again.

 

~~~ 

They break out the PASIV, of course they do, of course. Arthur suspects that it might be half the reason Ariadne's willing to sleep with him. He can't leave it to sit under the bed in his hotel room and collect dust, there's no reason to run down a job by himself, and Ariadne lights up in dreams like the moon in her newly-made sky.

"I'm experimenting with landscape architecture," she says, in the middle of a hedge maze on the side of a hill that looks a little like the Parc des Buttes Chaumont and a little like a tropical resort, complete with waterfalls.

"Can you make them flow backwards?" Arthur asks, and keeps an eye out for his projections while Ariadne practices. He has to shoot her, that time, before the vicious parts of his subconscious take out all their rage at her disregard for the laws of physics. Next time, it is his dream, and he drags her back to the corn field for more marksmanship practice.

She uses dreamspace to set up pieces of buildings and geometric puzzles she's working on for her classes, wanders through rooms with her lips pursed thoughtfully, gazing at the placement of windows and the height of the ceiling. "Do you think it would feel better if the ceiling were six inches higher?" she asks, and raises it. Arthur made her get rid of all of the stairs to the other floors, this time, before the projections could get to them.

Arthur is not an architect and never wants to be; he can hold a dreamscape that someone else has built, and he can create simple, stable environments that hearken back to places he's been too many times to forget. He takes Ariadne to a beach, to a crowded city somewhere in southeast Asia, to a set of mossy temple ruins that Cobb once designed and Arthur spent two weeks learning by heart.

"What happens if we go into a dream and the dreamer doesn't have any clear idea of what they want to build?" Ariadne asks. She is building a tower, adding levels above them with each set of stairs they climb, up and up right towards the impossibly-crescent moon. "Does it just come in blank?"

"Don't try it," Arthur advises. "The dreamer/subject relationship works because the dreamer is imposing conscious logic on unstructured unconscious. If you go in unprepared, the structure of the dream world gets built around _your_ unstructured unconscious. The whole landscape can shift without warning."

"Sounds chaotic," Ariadne says.

"That's an understatement," says Arthur. "That's why they brought in architects in the first place. They needed somebody who understood how to actually build physical structure to keep the dream from collapsing right away."

"Makes sense," Ariadne muses, and goes back to stacking up pillars, a winding staircase spiraling up between them, without any more thought.

Cobb hadn't taught her anything, not really. Ariadne knows the rules of the dreamworld, or at least Cobb's version of the rules, the things you must never, ever do unless he has to himself, but she doesn't understand anything about how to use them.

It's Cobb's fault for being an artist, a researcher, a dreamer in the old sense of the term, for spending however many years convinced that the important question was the nature of reality and not what you  _do_ in it. He's left Ariadne with a head full of theories and no idea how they translate into action. Even if Arthur leaves her alone now, she'll end up back in it, strung out and crazy like Nash, like Oldenberg or Espera or a hundred other names Arthur could name. Like Mal.

They spend more time together in dreams than in reality. Ariadne's a third-year architecture student with classes and projects and friends, little enough time for Arthur outside her real life, let alone in it. They crawl into bed fully clothed, chaste as siblings, only to plug into the PASIV and fuck themselves raw in gilded palaces and on beaches that stretch as far as the eye can see.

It's not love. It's not even a little bit like love, it's just sex and fantasy, and they're rarely ever together awake, but it still reminds Arthur too much of Dom and Mal. Mal and the dreamscape were all one, for Dom, too entwined and too beloved; he met Mal the same week Professor Miles first brought him into the dream and he fell for them both at the same time, all romance in the most classical sense, the way that meant 'not reality'. Dom lost Mal to the dreams and then couldn't dream without her, because just like the personal should never (must always) run up into the professional, a dream  _cannot_ (has to) be built around something you want badly enough to warp reality for it.

After days when they wake up and he curls into Ariadne with too much need, Arthur buys plane tickets, next-day, first-class, anywhere in the world. He spends five days in Crete solely because he's never been, a long weekend in Singapore because he has and liked it, goes swimming in his underwear on a beach in Rio di Janiero. He spends four days in Mombasa visiting Yusuf; he doesn't ask after Eames, and Yusuf doesn't ask after Ariadne. They get sloppy-drunk on cheap beer, Arthur with his tie loosened and the top two buttons of his good shirt undone, swapping the funniest old stories he had about life in the army for a series of hilarious tales about medical school

Ariadne never asks where he's been. He calls her when he gets back to town if she doesn't call first; if she's busy, she answers just long enough to say "Not today", and if he's out of the country he lets it ring straight to a voicemail she never leaves.

"Yusuf says hello," Arthur says when he gets back from Kenya, though Yusuf had done no such thing. He would if he'd known Arthur even saw Ariadne any more, and that's what counts.

"Oh? How's he doing?"

"He's good. He moved his shop to a bigger location, he says his customers have just about forgiven him for leaving for two months."

"Good, I'm glad." Ariadne drops her purse and coat carelessly over the couch on her way to the bedroom of Arthur's hotel suite. She toes off her shoes and leaves them neatly next to her side of the bed. "Hey, have you heard from Cobb lately?"

"Only a few emails. He said the kids are adjusting well." Arthur had written back as tersely as possible, with more words for Singapore than Paris, and no mention at all of Ariadne. He can't lie to Cobb worth shit, but the last thing he wants is for this thing, this strange little pit stop on the road of life, to become an actual  _thing_ in Cobb's head. Cobb and his mother are the only two people in the world still worthy of the name 'family'. As such, he'd like to keep them as far away from his questionable live choices as possible.

"Is he coming to terms with life as a stay-at-home dad?" Ariadne asks. Arthur kicks his shoes off in the general direction of the door and smirks at the mental image.

"God help him," he agrees, and bends down to fish the PASIV out from under the bed while Ariadne lies back, waiting.

It's nothing like love and a little bit like desperation, the way Ariadne's eyes light up when he brings out the silver case, the way Arthur's never been good at 'alone'. It's not romantic so much as mercenary--but Arthur's been a mercenary before, for a little while, and the specter of commercial give-and-take is more comforting than anything else.

 

~~~ 

"You should meet some of my friends," Ariadne says, one crisply clear afternoon in October when she actually has enough of a gap in her schedule to visit outside the time dilation of a dream. She's demolishing a _croque-madame_ across the table from him at the cafe halfway between his hotel and his metro stop, ravenous like she hasn't eaten since breakfast. The sun is streaming down in bright, narrow strips cast between the shadows of buildings, already slipped below the roofs around them, and it is only just early enough in the evening and the year to sit outside in their jackets.

"They think I'm hiding some secret French boyfriend," Ariadne continues. Arthur raises his eyebrows and carefully does not choke on a mouthful of coffee.

"I'm from the Midwest," Arthur says, and even more carefully, does not address the word 'boyfriend'.

"And if you meet them you can help me convince them that we're not dating," Ariadne says. "I told them you're just a friend from the internship I had over the summer, but it doesn't help that I can't tell them what we actually _did_."

"My mom thinks I'm a spy for the CIA," Arthur offers. Ariadne's eyes go wide as saucers over the rim of her cup, and she puts her coffee down, choking. Arthur leans back lazily in his chair and grins. "It's actually more believable than the truth."

"I don't know what's more surprising, that you'd lie to your mother like that, or that you're mentioning her at all," Ariadne says once she's breathing again. "You've never talked about her."

"She has nothing to do with all this," Arthur says, and whether    
_this_   
means the dreams or the work or Paris or Ariadne herself, is up to her to interpret. "All right," he adds, to forestall any more questions, "I'll have drinks with your friends. Besides, it never hurts to scout new potential architects."

She makes a little face at him, but turns back to her sandwich, obviously pleased. "You know, if you ever need an architect for a job..."

"There's plenty of more legal ways for you, too," Arthur points out.

"It all goes together, though," Ariadne says. "The dreams and the subconscious and the secrets. Does it really matter if I'm helping steal secrets for the government or for someone like Saito?"

Arthur sighs. She's Cobb's student, and this is the problem with Cobb, that he lets the boundaries in his own head get so washed away that he never explains them to his students until it's too late. "The dream and the job are separate," he says, firmly, so there's no mistake. "There are a hundred different ways of using the dreamscape that nobody's even thought of yet, and at least a few dozen that they have. Dreaming is a fascinating, addictive experience based on warping the laws of reality. Extraction is a way of getting paid for dreaming."

Ariadne tilts her head, listening, considering. "So is that why you do it?" she asks. "It's just...a means to an end, a way to keep food on the table while you explore your own dreamscape? I mean, I don't know if what we got paid over the summer is anything like what you make on a normal job, but you could do three or four of those and never work again."

"I'm good at it," Arthur says. "Besides, somebody needed to keep an eye on Cobb."

"Not anymore, Cobb's back with his children."

"And I'm not working any more."

"Are you going to?"

It's the obvious question. Arthur looks down at the remains of his chicken and frites and fiddles with his napkin so as not to answer.

"I like challenges," he says finally, which is as much truth as he has, right now.

"So do I," Ariadne says. Arthur looks up. Her smile is challenging, triumphant.

"You don't know what you're asking to get into," Arthur warns her. "You think you understand the dreaming, but like I said, the job is a whole different game. It has its own set of rules, and it takes more than just architectural skill to be good at it. You've only seen one job go down, and it was about as far from typical as it gets."

"So teach me," Ariadne says.

Arthur glances up at the fading sun, down at his watch. "Once you get into this world, it has a way of not letting people back out," he says, his last warning.

"Yeah, I know. Why do you think I'm here?" she asks.

Arthur tosses a few bills down on the table and slides his wallet back into his pocket. "All right, then. Let's go."

 

~~~ 

When Arthur isn't with Ariadne, which is most of the time, but still in Paris, he walks.

Paris is an old European city, the kind that's been built up upon itself instead of spreading out, so despite housing two million people it's barely eight miles across. It's easy to get lost in.

Cobb calls him at three in the afternoon, Paris time, while he's standing on a footbridge over the Canal Saint-Martin, staring at the water slowly rising in the lock. It's the first call he's taken, other than Ariadne, in a month. Arthur looks at the call display for a long time before he flips the phone open to answer.

Arthur hesitates, doesn't say anything for a moment.

"Hey," says Cobb.

"Hey," says Arthur, and smiles a little despite himself at the inanity of it. "How's the domestic life?"

"Do you know how to make cupcakes?" Cobb asks.

Arthur blinks. "That's what you called me up to ask? Cobb, following you through one career change was enough, I'm not helping you open a bakery."

Cobb sighs. He sounds exhausted, like the third week of a job where everything's starting to come together and nobody wants to stop and risk losing momentum. Arthur wonders how well Cobb is sleeping, in the bedroom he hasn't seen in the past two years except in his own memory-dreams. "It's for Phillipa's birthday, they have to bring treats to kindergarten."

"Can't you just buy them at the grocery store?"

"Grandma always  _made_ things." And it's the first birthday since Cobb's return, of course, the first family event of any kind. Arthur's sure it matters ten times as much to Cobb than Phillipa that this go right. He's not sure that home-baked cupcakes are actually the way to ensure things  _aren't_ a total disaster, but. It's Cobb. Arthur smiles at the mental image, settles himself in a comfortable lean against the railing of the bridge, and wonders why it took them so long to make this call.

"You could call her, seeing as how the most complicated thing you've ever watched me make is macaroni and cheese out of a box."

"She...may have laughed at me," Cobb admits, and Arthur can't refrain from doing the same.

"Try some of the box mixes," Arthur advises. "Phillipa won't care once they're covered in frosting and sprinkles. I'm betting you're expected to throw her a birthday party, too?"

"Yep," says Cobb. "With hats. And a guy who makes balloons."

"I want a picture of you in a hat made out of a balloon."

"I'll see what I can do," says Cobb. "So where are you these days?"

Arthur looks up from his toes, south towards the city. It isn't a movie, there's no soaring view of the Eiffel Tower to gaze at in irony, just trees, and the cobblestoned walk next to the canal, and graceful iron bridges arcing up at intervals. "Around," he says. "Europe, for now."

"You got a job?"

"Not yet." There's a fascinating piece of gravel at his feet. "Basking in the warm glow of a job terribly done."

"Hey, we managed it, didn't we?" Cobb says. "It's worth being proud of."

"By the skin of our teeth." Inception was more of a bad job brilliantly done than the other way around, but too much of what went wrong hit way too near to home to leave Arthur riding the wave of self-satisfied adrenaline most close jobs give him. Maybe that's why he's still in Paris, watching a tugboat putter down a canal like it means a damn thing. "Any word from the others?"

"Shouldn't I be asking you that?" Cobb asks. "Did you stop keeping track of things after I left?"

"Yusuf and Ariadne went home, they're out of the game," Arthur says. Temporarily, if the past week of safe-building practice and learning about cons is any indication, but Cobb doesn't know that. "Eames is making the rounds of northern Africa. I was just wondering if you talked to anyone over the age of six these days."

"Hey, the neighborhood ladies give great advice when it comes to getting gum out in the wash," Cobb says, and it sounds like a jest but Arthur is somewhat disturbed to realize that it's not. Dom Cobb, best extraction specialist in the black market, leader of the only team to ever successfully perform inception, is spending his time planning birthday parties and chatting with stay-at-home moms about laundry. He actually sounds like he's    
_enjoying_   
it.

Those kids are lucky to have him, Arthur thinks, and says, "Well, so long as you don't get bored." He doesn't want to think about what's going to happen to James and Phillipa when Cobb gets bored.

"Not likely," says Cobb. "James ate an entire houseplant last week, and Phillipa's begging for a dog. I'm keeping busy."

"Well, good," Arthur says. There's something else, something Cobb hasn't brought up yet, that he's waiting on Arthur to ask just the right combination of questions for. After almost two months on his own, Arthur's finding he's lost the patience for Cobb's secrets. "Was there something else?"

"I talked to Miles the other week," says Cobb. "He says Ariadne's doing well this year, but her designs are a lot more ambitious than they were before."

"Good for her. She's a smart kid, she's going places," Arthur says.

"He also said the gossip on campus is that she's spending all her free time with some mysterious older boyfriend from her internship over the summer." Cobb's voice is flat with disapproval. Arthur can picture the squint he's probably giving the phone right now, thousands of miles and an ocean away. He's spent so many years knowing exactly what Cobb's disappointed expression looks like.

"I know what I'm doing," Arthur says finally, because 'it's not what it sounds like' may be true but it leads to a whole realm of discussion he'd rather not have.

"So it is you."

"More or less." The tugboat's made it past the lock, now. Arthur watches its approach, counts the crew members and waits to see if Cobb breaks first.

"Tell me you're not just using her, Arthur," Cobb says, tight with strain that has absolutely nothing to do with Ariadne.

"Of course I am," Arthur says. "It's just two people, using each other. She's good in dreams. She was never going to just sit back while that got taken away."

Cobb is quiet for a moment. The next thing he says, "You're using her for sex in exchange for access to the PASIV?" is still quiet, dangerously so. Arthur sighs.

"It's significantly more complicated than that, and frankly, it's none of your business," he says. "Nobody is getting hurt. I told you, I know what I'm doing."

The silence is longer, this time. The tugboat sounds its horn, low and mournful, right as it passes under Arthur's bridge. Much, much farther away, he can hear the sounds of children playing.

"I trust you, Arthur," Cobb says finally. "I always have. But Ariadne deserves somebody who's going to do right by her."

"Ariadne deserves whatever _she_ wants enough to look for," Arthur corrects. "Back off here."

"Right," Cobb says, Cobb sighs, like a disappointed parent left no choice but to give up. "Anyway, thanks for the tip on the cupcakes."

"Good luck with that party," Arthur says. "Remember, balloon hat."

"Check your email in a few days. Enjoy Paris."

"I always do," Arthur says, and hangs up the phone.

It's only midafternoon, but it's Paris, so no time is too early for a drink. Arthur tucks his cell phone into his pocket and turns towards the nearest metro stop, striding off the bridge and away from the canal without a backwards glance. Suddenly, he'd very much like to get drunk.

 

~~~

 

"How am I going to learn to steal somebody's secrets if I can't practice?" Ariadne asks, and so Arthur makes the latest in his string of bad decisions, and lets his subconscious populate her dream.

"I don't want any of your big secrets, so warn me before I open it up," Ariadne says, and hefts a shovel over one shoulder. They're at the foot of a tall, grassy hill, surrounded by impenetrable-looking woods. Arthur follows Ariadne up the winding gravel path as much out of curiosity over what kind of vault she's built here.

"I haven't got any deep secrets involving hills and forests," Arthur tells her as they trudge upwards. His subconscious gave him combat boots instead of loafers. Arthur is fond of his subconscious. "How do you intend to trigger me?"

"Structurally," Ariadne pants. "It seems to me that, as much as the subject's subconscious reacts to things in the dream that the subject hasn't even consciously experienced yet, then even if I don't put you in mind of the particular information I'm looking for with conversation or environmental triggers, just the kind of safe or box might get your subconscious to leave the right information there."

"Clever," says Arthur, and means it. "Hard to do with any specificity, though. For instance, if you give the mark a bank vault, you'll probably get financial information, but _which_ financial information--"

"That's why I wanted to see how much we could narrow it down. You might be able to steal information that the mark never had to even consciously think about at all."

"Not bad, Ariadne." She was made for this. Miles be damned. "Just one question, how am I going to warn you about whatever we're breaking into up here if I don't know what it is before you open it?"

"For now I just want to know if whatever's in the container stays the same after you see the container with your conscious mind," Ariadne says. "I can pick it up and shake it before I show it to you, right?"

Arthur smiles, wider than he would if she weren't in front of him on the steep trail. "Sure," he says. "I'm curious."

The top of the hill is as gently curved as the sides are steep. Directly in the middle is a huge, gnarled apple tree, perfect for climbing, with a tire swing dangling off one branch. It's an excellent vantage point for the surrounding area, so Arthur leans against the tree trunk to keep a wary eye out for stray projections.

"Good, just don't look this way until I say you can," Ariadne says. There's the crunch of the shovel sinking into loose, sandy soil. Arthur lets himself relax. There's only another hour or so left on the PASIV, dream-time, and if Ariadne can't dig her container up by then she'll learn a valuable lesson about hiding your safes too well for even you to find them. Somehow, he doubts it'll be a problem.

Indeed, it isn't much longer before the scrape-scrape of shovel on dirt is interrupted by the scrape-thunk of shovel hitting something solid. Metal, Arthur thinks, and wonders if his noticing that will throw off Ariadne's results. He keeps his eyes on the distant horizon, thin wisps of clouds skimming over the tops of endless trees, and waits patiently while she scuffles in the dirt.

"Okay," Ariadne says finally. "I don't know what's in here, but I know how much it weighs and what it sounds like. If you change it too much by looking at it, one of us will know." Arthur turns.

Ariadne's crouched down next to a deep hole, dirt streaked across her nose and wisps of hair coming loose around her face, sweaty-damp even from dream exertion and the heat of a sun that doesn't exist. There's a metal cylinder a little larger than a shoebox in her lap. When Arthur leans down to take it, she pats the grass next to her, and he finds himself sitting on the ground, back against the roots of the apple tree. Ariadne hands the box over.

It's not terribly heavy, for being made out of metal. It's labeled in big, bright letters that look like a child's crayon scrawl: 'TIME CAPSULE'. Lower, 'ARTHUR, AGE 20'. He raises an eyebrow at Ariadne.

"What, you never buried one of those when you were a kid?" she asks. "It was going to be age eight, but you never talk about your childhood. I thought it might be too private."

"Next time, think about changing the font to go with the different setting," Arthur says, and shakes the capsule next to his ear. Something soft and fabric shifts against the side, and then, quieter, he hears a small 'clink'. It's the obvious, then. He didn't have many dark secrets at twenty, just memories of what was true then that he never pulls out to look at now. "I know what's in here. Go ahead, see if it's changed." He hands it back.

Ariadne pauses with her hand on the lid to give him one more, long-considering look. "You sure it's okay if I open this?" she asks.

"You invaded Cobb's dreams without permission and bullied him into telling you every detail of his darkest secret," Arthur points out.

"Yeah, and I learned my lesson. Besides, I don't think what's in here is going to send me to Limbo if I'm not careful. I just...don't want to force you into anything you're not comfortable with."

Which is patently ridiculous, because he hasn't been on a job in three months and he's still living out of a hotel room in Paris, not sleeping with anybody but her. The last thing Arthur wants is to explain how much she's already pushed him. "Ariadne," he says. "Open the capsule."

She unscrews the cap and lets the contents slide out onto her lap, careful not to drop anything. There are only two things in there, a green hat with a patch sewn onto the front, and a pair of tags on a chain. Ariadne picks the tags up delicately, respectfully, curiously.

"You were in the army," she says, and he nods, feeling the lightness against his chest where those tags used to dangle all over again. She blinks, focusing on the name etched into the metal. "I thought Arthur was your--"

"It's the name I go by," Arthur says, wondering why he ever thought this was a good idea.

She picks up the beret next, running her fingers over the embroidered insignia. "From oppression, liberation?"

" _De Oppresso Liber_ ," Arthur says. "Motto of the US Army special forces. It probably shouldn't be in here, I didn't earn it until I was almost 21."

It's a symbol, this beret, conjured up by his brain from all the ideals of Corporal J. Arthur, old enough to serve two terms in the desert and too young to drink on base back home. It doesn't have the snag running up the side of the insignia like the one sitting over his dog tags on the highest shelf in his mother's closet, something she at least understands enough to be proud of.

"But it was important to you," Ariadne says, and doesn't ask any of the questions he knows are coming, later. She's closer to twenty than Arthur's twenty-eight. He wonders what he'd have thought of her back then, all her innocent idealism and sweeping dreams.

"It was, then," Arthur says. He takes the beret out of her lap and drops it back into the time capsule, leaving it to the past where it belongs.

"Not anymore?"

"I didn't say that," Arthur says, and stands up. There's dirt all over his jeans but he doesn't bother to brush himself off. "If we're done here, we should throw ourselves out and go somewhere more interesting."

"There should still be at least twenty minutes left on the PASIV," Ariadne says, but stands up anyway.

"I brought a gun."

"Of course," Ariadne says. "Okay, do me, then you."

He shoots her between the eyes from five feet away without a flinch, then re-holsters the pistol and bends down to pick his dog tags up from the dirt. He thinks he would have liked Ariadne when he was in the service, if he'd met her like she is now. Of course, when he was twenty Ariadne was wearing a pleated skirt and daydreaming through math class, and when he was in high school she was still in pigtails. Arthur isn't even thirty yet, but he feels old. His twenty-year-old self wouldn't recognize him, some days.

He opens his eyes with the lurch and thud of landing hard on a carpeted concrete floor. Ariadne's head peeks over the edge of the bed to look at him.

"You didn't wake up," she says. Arthur props himself up on his elbows, ignoring the new bruise on his hip.

"Thanks for the kick," he says, and crawls back up into bed.

 

~~~ 

"So, you were in the army before you met Cobb?" Ariadne asks, maybe a week later, propping herself up on one elbow to look at him curiously. If you count time spent asleep with the PASIV, nearly all of their conversations take place in bed these days.

"I met him while I was in," Arthur clarifies. "We started working together after I left." The bed at his hotel is more comfortable than the one in Ariadne's tiny dorm room, certainly far more spacious, and no risk of curious roommates, but Ariadne's room is soft and golden with afternoon sunlight. It makes the whole world seem syrupy-slow, dreamlike, though if this were Arthur's dream he'd have made the bed firmer.

"Why'd you leave?" she asks. "International globe-trotting mind criminal sounds way more glamorous than soldier in the army, but you had to have a reason."

"I didn't leave the army to become a criminal." Arthur's fingers trace idle patterns over the indentations left in her skin by the strap of her bra. "I left because the Army isn't the most comfortable place when you're better at your job than your superiors and aren't afraid to let them know it."

Ariadne raises her eyebrows at that, a wry, mocking grin on her face. "I can just imagine. So all right, how'd you go from that to working with Cobb?"

"It was the easiest way to get back into dreaming," he says. He doesn't even know, right now, if they're awake or not. He can't remember how long the sun's been at that same angle, sweet honey through the gaps in Ariadne's fluttering thin curtains. Right now, it doesn't seem to matter.

"Right--you said it was an army training technique."

"Once, but by my time they'd moved on. Nowadays the only people in the US military getting dream training are the ones expected to use it for intelligence gathering, and some of the recon marines."

"Really? Why not?"

If this is a dream, then he'll be able to slide his hand up from her ribs and under the pillow, curl it around the butt of a loaded pistol where he'd never dare put it in real life. A moment later the barrel is resting lightly against Ariadne's temple. She blinks.

"Did you want to wake up?" she asks. "It's a little abrupt, and I didn't have anything else going on tonight, but--"

"No," Arthur says, and tucks the gun back under the pillow, carefully, dream gun or not. "They stopped using the shared dreaming as a training exercise because of that."

"Because when you die, you wake up? Isn't that the point?"

"Because no matter how much you trust me, Ariadne, I just had a loaded gun to your head and you didn't even flinch," he says. "You're so used to death as an escape that it doesn't scare you any more."

"Well, I know this isn't real," she says.

"It's not about what you know, it's about your reflexes. That split second of fear where most people just freeze. A soldier, a good one, uses that moment to react to the danger and save his own life. But if you're so used to getting shot in the face that you don't even have the reflex any more--"

"Then you don't react," Ariadne finishes. "Are you saying that the soldiers they trained in the dreams were getting killed because they weren't afraid to die?"

"Something like that," Arthur says. "Soldiers with no fear of death can be incredibly effective at carrying out a mission, but they also tend to have pretty high mortality rates."

"That's terrible," she says. Then, "Wait, what about us? How do you--"

"You get some of the conditioning back after you get shot a few times by real weapons," Arthur says dryly. "Or shot and not killed often enough. It never quite brings back that instinctive fear of death, but fear of pain can be useful enough."

"Great," says Ariadne, looking like she thinks it's anything but. Arthur slides his hand back over her rib cage, stroking gently.

"Bothered?" he asks. "If you get out now, it'll never be a problem. If you want to keep going in the illegal extraction business, the best I can assure you is that you'll probably be painfully wounded enough times on jobs gone wrong before you start coming to the attention of angry people with real guns."

"No, why would I be bothered by that?" she asks, dry as Sahara. "I just...never thought I was the kind of person who would ever be comfortable around guns. What's next, fearlessness in the face of high explosives?"

"If you like," says Arthur. "I was going to offer to train you in hand-to-hand, first."

"All right, I was kidding," says Ariadne.

"I wasn't," says Arthur. He hadn't been planning on it before the words left his mouth, but it's a good idea. Ariadne won't always have a gun to hand, and the ability to throw a good punch is sometimes worth any amount of fancy weaponry. "You should learn that in the real world, though. The reflex memory carries over either way, but your body in a dream can do things it won't in reality. You risk running into a situation where your brain will try to send a signal to move in a way your muscles can't keep up with."

"Maybe," she says. "I'll think about it."

"Do," he says.

 

~~~ 

Ariadne's friends make Arthur uncomfortable. He expected this--he's still fairly sure that he and Ariadne have nothing in common beyond the dreaming, and he was ready for the half-dozen artistically-inclined fellow students she spends her free time to be about as different from Arthur's experience of the world as it's possible to get.

He didn't expect them to remind him of himself at twenty-four, after the military but before Cobb's meltdown put him back on the clock 24/7. Even when he spent time with the college crowd, Arthur hung out with the hard scientists, the grad students doing research internships at the think tank where Cobb and Mal worked, the ones who believed in straight lines and hard proof. Architects are all about the most attractive way to get from Point A to Point B, however long it takes. Arthur's known enough of them to say so. He never expected that he and Ariadne's friends would get along.

Eva is painfully shy until you piss her off or get a few drinks in her, and then she's like a tiny dark-haired whirlwind, quick with words and brilliant at argument in three languages. Arthur goads her into a five-minute rant about misappropriation of cultural artifacts in Russian just to hear her talk. Guillermo is Italian; he lives down the hall from Ariadne in the foreign student housing. He flirts outrageously with all of the girls but only has eyes for the boys. Elizabeth is tall and flamingly red-headed and hugely Scottish, and she can quote both Shakespeare and Doctor Who extensively from memory.

Ariadne slips in with them easily, all of them almost painfully young to look at, tossing their heads back in laughter without ever checking their exits or keeping an eye on the crowd. Arthur crosses his legs and tries to look relaxed. The weight of his ankle holster presses against his leg like a reminder. He has a clear eye line to three of the bar's exits.

"Mais oui, we _have_ to go see them, Elizabeth, come on," Chloe says. "Ariadne, you're in, non?" Arthur's only accompanied Ariadne's friends to the bars a few times, but Chloe is always trying to coax the rest of them to some concert by a band Arthur's sure he wouldn't know even if he were French. 

She reminds him, breathtakingly, of Jenny, Jenny who he dated for almost six months before she found herself another boyfriend while he was on a job and didn't bother to mention it until three weeks after he got back. Jenny knew every obscure indie band in LA and dragged him to see half of them. She hated the war without remotely understanding what it meant, and Arthur loved her, loved in her the innocence that was never going to need to know what it felt like to kill. Chloe sits down the table between Elizabeth and Jerome and dismisses everything she doesn't like with a flick of her hand, from American celebrities to international conflict, and if Arthur lets his vision blur a little it's 2007 all over again.

Arthur doesn't let his vision blur. He holds his beer loosely with his non-dominant hand, keeps an eye on the exits, and pretends he has something to contribute to the conversation.

"If I get done my project for Professor Gerald by Friday afternoon, I can make it," says Ariadne. "I think I might be up all Friday night to get it emailed in on time, though."

"Please, how much are you procrastinating, lovely girl?" Guillermo asks. "We all know you work twice as fast as the rest of us."

"But her designs are twelve times as mad, so it balances out a bit, doesn't it?" Elizabeth says. "Oh, no offense, Ariadne, you've just gone a bit modern art this year."

"I like trying new things," Arthur picks up on the edge of discomfort in Ariadne's tone, but he's not sure if anybody else at the table does. "Hey, even if I can't make it, maybe Arthur could go." She taps her toe against the back of his calf, lightly, affectionate. "Unless you have something better to do on a Friday night."

Arthur is pretty sure he outgrew cramped venues and music of questionable taste when he left his life behind to help save Cobb's. He almost wishes it were a tempting offer. Ariadne's friends eye him like the awkward interloper he is. He'd much rather go back to discussing Shakespeare or politics.

"I'm going to be out of town," he lies. "American Thanksgiving."

"Is that this week?" Chloe demands, and then leans over Elizabeth to swat Ariadne on the shoulder. "You never said."

"I'm  _Canadian_ . We had Thanksgiving last month."

"Tell me, what can possibly excuse such a poorly-matched meal?" Jerome asks. "It's bizarre. You have your meat and your gravy all mixed up with your sweets, cranberry jelly on your potatoes, it is the oddest thing I've ever heard."

"Tradition," Arthur says shortly. He can't help remembering how much Mal hated cranberry sauce. Chloe swats Jerome on the side of the head in turn.

" _Cretin_ ," she says. "It's cultural. You can't ask Americans why they do all the bizarre things they do, they're  _Americans_ . There's no explaining it."

On Friday night, Ariadne knocks on Arthur's door just as he's in the process of pouring himself another glass of wine to go with the pulpy paperback he got at the used bookstore last week. He sets it down without bothering with a bookmark.

"I thought you were supposed to be at a concert," Arthur says at the door.

"I thought you were going home for the holidays," Ariadne counters. Arthur doesn't answer, just closes the door behind her. Cobb would have had him, if Arthur had come, but LA isn't much like home any more.

"I need to build," says Ariadne. "I can't get this project straight, I'm going to fail unless I figure out what I'm doing. Can I use the PASIV?"

"What were you going to do if I really was back in the States?" Arthur is already moving towards the bedroom, kicking off his shoes as he goes. An evening of watching Ariadne build is more interesting than an evening alone with a book. Particularly this book.

"Cry," says Ariadne. "I didn't think you would be, though. I'm starting to be able to tell when you're lying."

"Remind me never to lie, then," Arthur says, and flips open the case. "Ready?"

"Ten minutes," Ariadne says. "Then I'll need to get some of it down on the computer." She drops her laptop case next to the bed and lays down, still in her coat. "Shall we?"

Ariadne spends the rest of the night in and out of dreams in ten-minute intervals that grow to hours. Arthur brings his book into the bedroom and reads in chunks while Ariadne pokes frantically on her computer, drawing and measuring and rotating things before determinedly reaching for the PASIV again. He's not about to let her go down by herself, not with as much change as she's wreaking on each little universe.

She finishes at four AM, after six hours of work that translate to nearly a full day, giddy with the adrenaline of success and deprivation of any sleep worthy of the name. Arthur flops back against his pillow with a little more drama than he would allow himself, if it weren't four in the morning.

"Take off your pants and come to bed, you're staying here tonight," he says. "Unless you have class, we're sleeping until noon."

Ariadne is always neat about her belongings at Arthur's. She sleeps in her clothes as often as not, rolling over after an hour with the PASIV into real sleep without bothering to change. When she does strip down for bed, she always makes a tidy pile of folded clothing, jeans, then shirt, then socks. She takes her bra off last, facing the wall away from Arthur like any modesty is left them at this point. Arthur's seen her naked a hundred times in dreams, but this isn't something they do in the real world. He turns away under the polite pretense of turning off the lamp as she slips under the covers.

"I'm not even tired," Ariadne says. "I'm still too wound up."

"You will be." She's warm all up his left side, down to almost nothing but skin where he slipped into a t-shirt and pyjama pants a few hours ago. Arthur's hand brushes up against her thigh, tentative, almost accidental. She shifts into it.

"We could..." Ariadne starts, rolling up on her side into the middle of the bed. Arthur lets his hand trail up her thigh and lightly across her stomach, come to rest cupping the curve of her hip. He can barely make out her face in the light from the street lamps behind the curtains.

"I don't even have anything," Arthur says. Dream sex has never gotten anyone pregnant, after all.

"There's other things we can do," says Ariadne, and closes in for the kiss, sliding one leg forward, pressing, firm, demanding. Arthur curves his free hand behind her head to pull her closer.

Real sex is messier than dream sex, but the worn, languid feeling it leaves lasts longer. Arthur wakes up with the sun high in the sky, Ariadne nestled against him, her hair spreading out across his chest and, now that he's awake, tickling enormously. He's already making plans to go home for Christmas.

 

~~~ 

Arthur is back in Paris for the new year. That's after three days spent on the northern coast of Australia, baking away the cold of an Iowa Christmas and snorkeling in the most dangerous waters on the planet.

The only perspective home-for-the-holidays has given him is a resurgence of that old aching need to never set foot in Jesup, Iowa again. Arthur hasn't felt this    
_stuck_   
since he was sixteen. He slept on the sofa in the living room on his uncle's farm, trudged out in the snow to help feed the horses in the morning, and tried to switch with some grace between fake obtuseness and condescending sarcasm in the face of his cousins' curious sneers about his life. His mom kept going quiet whenever he walked into a room, quiet and sad and older than he ever remembers her.

It's the first Christmas Arthur's made it home for in two years. He remembers it being easier, when he knew the next flight out could take him back to an apartment in still-sunny LA, Mal with bottles of champagne, Dom grilling a New Year's steak dinner, and nobody asking any awkward questions. Home was easier to take when he had a better one to go back to.

Well, now he has a blandly luxurious hotel suite entirely decorated in shades of silver and gray, a New Year's Eve spent alone with Edith Piaf and the most expensive bottle of champagne he could find, and Ariadne. For whatever that's worth. It's not much to build a life on, but it's a start.

"To not jumping off a fucking building," Arthur toasts the lights of Paris over the rail of his balcony, and then gulps Dom Perignon straight from the bottle.

Somewhere, a clock strikes eleven. Arthur suspects that he is well on his way to drunk, which is ridiculous, drunk on half a bottle of champagne, but maybe it was the three martini's he'd had instead of dinner, or the fifth of vodka he'd brought home afterwards.

Ariadne is either in Toronto, or out at some ridiculously decked-out nightclub with Elizabeth the Scottish Amazon, and Guillermo who's charming with the ladies, and Chloe who is just like Jenny. Ariadne is living. The idea aches with a heaviness like taking a cannonball straight to the gut, but Arthur would like to believe that he's too drunk to figure out why.

He fumbles his cell phone out of his pocket left-handed, takes another swig out of the bottle clutched in his right. She only takes two buttons to call.

The phone rings once, twice, a terrible idea buzzing in his ear. "Arthur?" Ariadne answers. She sounds out of breath. There's a crowd behind her, but muffled, like she's stepped out into a bathroom or an alleyway to take the call.

"Don't do this any more," he says. "Don't come back here."

"Arthur, what...are you drunk?" she asks.

"I used to have a life," Arthur tells the phone. "I had a Chloe--a Jenny. She left me while I was living in a shack on the Norwegian border in the middle of winter. Brad couldn't handle the guns."

"Who's Brad?" Ariadne asks. Come to think of it, he never mentioned any of that. He never mentioned a lot of things.

"It was worth it," he says. "Cobb needed me. The point man always protects his team leader."

"Arthur, I'm coming over there," Ariadne says, which is the opposite of the point, which is exactly what he wants, exactly what he doesn't want to want.

" _I_ came to  _him_ , Ariadne," Arthur stresses. "I needed him. You don't need me. You don't need the dreams, and you don't need me, and I'm telling you, you do  _not_ want to  _do_ this."

There are muffled noises on the other end, instead of a response. " _Il faut que je vais--oui, oui, a demain, a demain--_ " the sound of the crowd louder, then quieter again. "I can make my own decisions about what I want to do," Ariadne says. Arthur groaned and leans back against the side of the building.

"You don't have the information to decide that," he says. "By the time you do it'll be too late. You don't want to be me."

"What, completely drunk all by myself before it's even midnight on New Year's Eve?" Ariadne asks. "No, I don't want to be you. I'm still coming."

"Don't," says Arthur. "Don't, don't ever come by here again..."

"Don't be stupid. Somebody has to make sure you don't drink so much you drown in your own vomit," she tells him. "Look, I'm going down into the metro, I'm going to lose signal now. Don't give yourself alcohol poisoning before I get there."

Then there's nothing but a dial tone ringing in Arthur's ear. He pulls the cell phone away and stares at it for a moment, contemplating the fall from the eleventh-story balcony. All he'd have to do is drop it, scatter all those phone numbers from the extractors, the chemists, the architects, six years of infiltrating the community of dream extraction specialists, and be done with it.

He puts it back into his pocket. Arthur isn't that dramatic, and he doesn't have enough else left in his life to waste what he's got.

Time goes hazy for a bit, but the other half of the champagne is gone by the time he hears the knock on the door to his suite, sharp and perfunctory. Arthur pushes himself to his feet--apparently at some point he'd sunk down against the wall of the building, and his ass is cold from sitting on bare concrete. At least he's wearing shoes. He doesn't bother to check the peephole before he opens the door. Ttonight, for one night only, if somebody's sent armed assassins after him, he honestly couldn't care enough to put up a fight.

"Jesus, you're a wreck," Ariadne says, and pushes him back into the hotel room. "Give me that bottle. At least you got yourself trashed on the good stuff."

"I think it was the vodka, actually," Arthur says, letting her steer him backwards towards the lounge. The floor wobbles under his feet. "I should sit."

"You should drink a gallon of water and go to bed, Arthur." Ariadne pushes him, and everything wobbles, until he finds himself tottering backwards into sitting on the couch. "What were you even thinking?"

Ariadne drops her coat over the back of the couch, like always. She looks fantastic underneath, red top and short skirt and just a little sparkly. She looks beautiful. She looks  _young._

"You shouldn't let this ruin you, Ariadne," Arthur says. "Dreaming is addictive. It'll never let you go. You'll do anything to keep going in. You get involved in extraction and then you're fleeing countries, getting put on government watchlists, shooting people in the real world. You'll give up your life to it."

"Well, then, maybe it's an addiction I already have," says Ariadne. "Look, just because I'm apparently the only friend you have who you can call when you're trashed and alone in the middle of the night doesn't mean I need you to take care of me. I'm here because I want to be."

"I'm sorry," Arthur says.

"I know." Ariadne is rummaging through the cupboards in his little kitchenette, looking for glasses. She finds a pitcher, finally, and fills the whole thing up with water. "Drink this," she says, and shoves it at him. "I can't believe I have to treat you like my college roommate."

"I'd be fine," Arthur tells her, but drinks the water anyway.

"If you were fine, you wouldn't have called me." Arthur moves to set the pitcher down, half full, but Ariadne's glare stops him. He gulps more. "Damnit, Arthur, what are you even doing to yourself?"

"I'll let you know when I figure it out." Arthur groans and leans back against the sofa. He's already starting to see the creeping edges of sobriety. He'd really rather not, tonight. "Keep your life, Ariadne."

"I'll keep the life I want when I find it," she says. She takes the pitcher out of his hands and sets it down gently on the coffee table, then hauls him up to his feet by his wrists. "Come on."

"And what's that?" Arthur asks, following her without resistance. He's got nowhere else to be.

"I'll let you know when I figure it out," Ariadne parrots. "Come on," she says. "Let's go to sleep."

 

~~~


End file.
